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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

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Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#161

Post by perl4ever »

beat wrote: post #70
bilbo0s wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh? This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1]. By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So…

An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk. Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just s…

"The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk"

50 years doesn't sound like all that long a timeframe when people are talking about 100 year bonds, and the idea that capital is scarce and expensive doesn't quite seem to apply when $15 trillion in global debt pays negative yields.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#162

Post by caf »

batmansmk wrote: post #85
beat wrote: post #2

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear.…

Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towar…

Gas and hydro are highly controllable, but nuclear, coal and geothermal aren't really - just in the opposite way to solar and wind.

Those sources are slow to ramp up and down - that's why the time-of-use power prices I face right now are at their lowest overnight (so I currently time shift as much load as I can to those times).

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#163

Post by perl4ever »

WalterBright wrote: post #114
fromthestart wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

> GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. Nope, I talked about incentivizing consumers to shift their demand based on a volatile price. I pointed out that much of this can be accomplished without need of batteries. For example, have the hot water tank heat up water higher than normal when electricity is cheaper, and lower when electricity is more expensive. Hot…

The water in the tank is functioning as a battery in that case.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#164

Post by perl4ever »

beat wrote: post #127
fromthestart wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

"Windless" is greatly overrated, for two reasons. First, utility-scale wind is built hundreds of feet in the air, not on the ground. Wind is much steadier there. And it's built in carefully selected locations for steady behavior. Second, it's not a single location. Wind may be lower in one location, but strong in another location 50 miles away. The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide area…

"The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works."

The idea that wind currents are uncorrelated across geographical areas, even on the scale of states, is not how wind actually works.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#165

Post by bob1029 »

beat wrote: post #71
surfmike wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do those prices for solar and wind factor in storage?

Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.

As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the fact that we had bet a certain % of the base load would have been supplied by all the new wind farms, but in reality we had to fire up every peaker plant in the state, and even request assistance from other grids in order to meet demand. The wind simply wasn't blowing. If more of our mix had been natural gas, even just 5-8%, that event would have been completely mitigated.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#166

Post by powerbroker »

bob1029 wrote: post #165
beat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.

As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the…

Adding just 10%, to Nat Gas plants, would be 5,000 MW on the Texas grid. Given that wind farms were operating at 1/5th of capacity during this Texas grid events, you would need something like double the current installed wind farm base to be able to deliver 5,000 MW at that 1/5th capacity utilization. It has taken decades to get to the current, rough, 24,000 MW nameplate capacity for Texas to get to where it is.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#167

Post by war1025 »

baking wrote: post #160
godelski wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty accurate, but nuclear can spin up and down, by controlling the fuel rods. This is one of the major advantage of the technology and why many suggest it be used in combination with solar, wind, and hydro (many as in the IPCC, which is why CNN pushed hard on everyone during the climate debates). It can be used to provide a base load (greatly reducing the need for batteries (or the need to invent good enough ones!…

Chernobyl happened during a scheduled shut-down test that was delayed by 10 hours because there was higher than expected electricity demand. They tried to speed-up the shut-down and the results did not go as expected. I think it may be a little naive to say that nuclear can spin up and down by controlling the fuel rods. I think Three Mile Island and Fukushima also had issues with getting rid of residual heat during a…

There was a video I saw a while ago, but I don't remember where, explaining that modern nuclear designs use passive safety mechanisms, whereas the original (currently in use) designs have active safety mechanisms that require ridiculous amounts of fallback and backup systems that make it much more difficult to guarantee safe operation in the event of an anomaly.

I think it had something to do with there being a salt plug that would melt if things got to hot, at which point everything would drain into a vessel designed to stop the reaction getting out of hand. So the cooling systems have to actively keep operating temperatures in range otherwise the plug melts and it goes into safe mode.

This is in contrast with what you describe where "shut down" is an elaborate process that takes time and correct order of operations in order to occur safely.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#168

Post by BeeOnRope »

beat wrote: post #62
Robotbeat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids near…

I really hope so! I think we need to see wind/solar at half the cost of gas to really break gas as an energy source. And battery storage is quite expensive for now - hundreds of dollars per mwh. Of course, there are other interesting alternatives, too - thermal storage, gravity, compressed air, etc. But conversion losses will probably always limit those systems to 25-35% efficiency at best, plus much higher construct…

25-35% efficiency? Pumped hydro is generally over 70% roundtrip.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#169

Post by MarkMc »

beat wrote: post #2

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear.…

So cost of PV solar has dropped 80% over past decade - it it reasonable to expect another 40% drop over the coming decade?

A quick Google search suggests that Solar PV efficiency is 11-22%. Could it be 20-35% in 2029?

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#170

Post by atq2119 »

sunkenvicar wrote: post #79
generatorguy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know why you are downvoted. I used to run solar powered sites that would have 5 rainy days in a row in which only about 10% of solar generation was delivered during daylight hours. We started with only enough batteries to last overnight and ended up with 10x that. Then we added 33% more when the first set of batteries had a short life due to getting so deeply discharged.

He’s downvoted because he’s bringing on-the-ground facts to a political discussion about solar and wind.

It may have more to do with the "haha lol", which is an antipattern for rational discussion.
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